Vacation Guide to the Solar System: Science for the Savvy Space Traveler

Startups are eyeing the market for space tourism, and NASA is discovering habitable planets. On this edition of River to River, host Ben Kieffer talks with the co-authors of Vacation Guide to the Solar System, a book that imagines an interplanetary vacation.

In the book, co-authors Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich take real data from NASA and other sources to create a whimsical and accurate picture of what it would really be like to travel our solar system.

Destination Mars: "Who hasn't dreamt of setting foot on the red planet? With butterscotch skies, colossal canyons, and the tallest volcano in the solar system, Mars in an oasis for romantics and adventurers alike. The vast, frigid deserts are exotic, yet strangely familiar. It's like a smaller version of Earth in some apocalyptic parallel universe, where the oceans have dried up and the atmosphere has drifted away to almost nothing. What's left is dust, rock, and a plethora of luxury resorts where you can escape the weight of all that gravity and heavy air of Earth."

Koski is one of the creators of the Guerilla Science collective, and Grcevich is an astronomer who worked at the American Museum of Natural History.

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Mars has been receiving a lot of attention recently. In the new Ridley Scott movie, The Martian, a NASA botanist is stranded on Mars and has to rely on his own ingenuity to survive. In real life, scientists have discovered evidence of present day water on the red planet.

On this edition of River to River, Ben Kieffer sits down with astrophysicists, Steve Kawaler of Iowa State University and Jasper Halekas of the University of Iowa, along with retired NASA astronaut, Clayton Anderson, to discuss the accuracy and impact of films like The Martian.

On Christmas Eve 1968, nine-year-old Clayton Anderson watched on television as Apollo 8 traveled to the far side of the moon. That night, his dreams of being an astronaut were born.

"I was enamored. I was just transfixed by what was happening," he says.

Anderson realized his dream. He's a veteran of two space flights and spent five months aboard the international space station in 2007. He's written about his life in space and on Earth in the new book, The Ordinary Spaceman: From Boyhood Dreams to Astronaut.

So far this year, Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines has welcomed 12 new babies, including 2 camels, 1 black rhino, 2 wallabies, 1 giraffe, 2 addax, a desert antelope, and 3 elands. Their newest addition to that family of babies is a newborn Japanese macaque, also known as a snow monkey.

During this River to River conversation, zookeeper Val Hautekeete talks with host Ben Kieffer.